Asserting that we “stereotype” life in the U.S.S.R. (because God knows there’s no proof it was ever really that bad), the New York Times published a piece arguing that women in East Germany had statistically better sex because they were given the government benefit of paid family leave and daycare:
Some might remember that Eastern bloc women enjoyed many rights and privileges unknown in liberal democracies at the time, including major state investments in their education and training, their full incorporation into the labor force, generous maternity leave allowances and guaranteed free child care. But there’s one advantage that has received little attention: Women under Communism enjoyed more sexual pleasure.
How do we know this? A comparative study conducted in the ’90s after the fall of the Berlin Wall showed that East German women had more orgasms. That’s right. The government is responsible for a woman’s orgasm, how often she has one and how good it is.
The argument gets even more absurd. Quoting anecdotal evidence at length, the Times’ best explanation for why women living behind the Iron Curtain were supposedly more satisfied comes from a woman who lived there as a single mother. “Sure, some things were bad during that time, but my life was full of romance,” she said. “After my divorce, I had my job and my salary, and I didn’t need a man to support me. I could do as I pleased,” she comments, speaking for single moms everywhere, I’m sure.
Women cited as defending their life under Communism also believe their daughters now living in freedom have it way worse because they work too much. These are women who were forced to put their children in daycare so they could get back to being economically useful. Man, those orgasms must have been mind-blowing in every sense of the term.
Diving into straight propaganda, the Times then notes:
The Soviets extended full suffrage to women in 1917, three years before the United States did. The Bolsheviks also liberalized divorce laws, guaranteed reproductive rights and attempted to socialize domestic labor by investing in public laundries and people’s canteens. Women were mobilized into the labor force and became financially untethered from men.
Nowhere in this piece do they discuss the fact that these legislative moves were designed to weaken families and force citizens to prioritize the needs and desires of the State. Women were forced to work in discriminatory conditions; “equal pay” didn’t exist in the language of Soviet Russia. Women were still expected to perform 100 percent of the domestic duties before and after work, so “gender equality” didn’t exist there, either. The Times never cites its own work covering “The Cruelest Abortion System” in the world, as they described Soviet Russia in 1989. Women forced to use abortion as a form of birth control (men didn’t feel like wearing condoms, the report cites) did so in barbaric and abusive conditions. Women may have been “untethered” from men, only to be tethered to the whims of the State. There is no freedom in that.
The author of the Times piece is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Every day she teaches women that true freedom can only come with and from complete government intervention and reliance. She asserts that Western women are essentially “jealous” of the “successes” of socialism in “liberating” women because these moves came from government, not independent women’s movements. The real joke is that the most popular women’s movements today are being used to do nothing more than champion the idea that for a woman to be truly free she must sell herself, body and soul, to the State.
Make no mistake, this piece was intended to do nothing more or less than champion the idea of federally mandated paid family leave and universal childcare. The professor failed to tell the whole truth about the sacrifices women were forced to make in exchange for paltry economic benefits that ripped their children from their arms or their wombs and put them back into back-breaking, soul-crushing conditions. The only thing the professor can offer in exchange for these government “benefits” is a promise that your sex will be better; a promise based on statistics that are questionable at best.
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